Quotes from Jonathan Ames

He was aware that he was not completely sane, so he kept himself in rigid check, playing both jailer and prisoner.

Joe knew that all human beings are the star of their own very important film, a film in which they are both camera and actor; a film in which they are always playing the fearful and lonely hero who gets up each day hoping to finally strike upon the life they are meant to lead, though they never do.

I do think everyone would be a lot happier if we laid eggs on our own and could just have friendship and didn't need to mount and penetrate one another.

Essentially I'm a pantheist-agnostic. I worship many deities with equal amounts of confusion.

How terrible to be alcoholic. You just want to quietly soothe and maybe poison yourself, but you end up poisoning those around you as well, like trying to commit suicide with a gas oven and unwittingly murdering your neighbors.

I felt myself falling asleep; my eyes were closing, and then I thought, Maybe I should just kill myself. Suicidal thoughts always sneak up on me like that. But I don't mind them. They're like aspirin. They calm me down.

I hid my underwear beneath a parked Peugeot.

It's not easy taking care of one's self, determining nap lengths and all that, but with two people it's a manageable job.

I was deeply depressed. I felt my brain slipping out of its casing and down my neck, like an egg sliding on a frying pan. So

It's very hard not to commit cancer suicide in America.

There was a naughty grin on her face and she said, "Wait. You'll get an erection and then what will I do?

I'm kind of an upbeat Hamlet.

All you need in politics is name recognition, even if the name is shit.

No, I'm not very productive at all. I'm probably like an animal. I mean, great animals in the ocean feed all the time. I'm someone who procrastinates, worries, for most of a month, and then I'll have a flurry of manic productivity with a sense of great urgency and fear for, like, two days.

I am always the source of the worst rumors about myself.

Twitter is so severe, you know? And it's completely for free, it's scattershot, and it's very easy to feel embarrassed. It's hard to be artful with it. It's like a ticker tape. It's not a forum that's worth mastering, you know?

I'm actually much more shy and self-conscious than people's perception of me.

I'm a somewhat isolated person in my own way, or I move along a little trail, I go this place, I go that place. It's not like I'm varying my exposure.

I always liked those characters in 'True Blood' who could turn into animals. I'd love to be an animal of some kind and run quickly through a forest.

There are so many talented young writers named Jonathan, with whom by comparison I suffer terribly.

I wish I was the kind of writer who would go to a war zone and write about something that's meaningful and important to people, but that's not my area of coverage.

I've really never written about my relationships, or things like that. I wouldn't want to divulge things that were too private.

I don't mind being ridiculed - well, I guess I would mind a little, but it would only last a few minutes - it's all very ephemeral; it doesn't really matter what people think of me.

Mostly I have to try to censor myself so as not to write things that will hurt other people, or that will go too far.